4' 33"
[Three Movements, no notes]
15 artists and their guests are taking part in a 10-day performance/exhibition entitled 4’33” after John Cage’s 1952 ‘silent’ musical composition. The event held at Magazin4, Bregenz, is conceived to generate and present new works of ingenuity and invention, based upon Cage’s original idea that music is all around us if only we are able to recognise it.

The ‘music’ of silence is thereby signified in gesture, or by proxy, yet is never actually silent. The original work caused a public row in the tradition of all the best radical avant-gardes. A concert pianist, stopwatch in hand, opened the lid and without touching the keys closed it after 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds (the average length of popular tunes, or of the muzak merchandised in the 1950s). The audience was, in true form, outraged by the scandal. Yet this is a serious work, with precedence in Eastern traditional forms of expression, where the thing not stated achieves greater significance.

Can we still be seized in bewilderment in the discomfiting face of something not immediately recognised as art or music if it exceeds the frame of our need for convention? If not, perhaps something is lost.

4’33” has been curated by Wolfgang Fetz and Peter Lewis. It is part of the City of Bregenz’s Summer Festival and celebrates the 15th anniversary of Magazin4.

4’33” starts on Saturday, July 14th, and runs through Sunday, 22nd. Works by Martin Creed and band, Fabienne Audeoud, Marcia Farquhar, Salomé Voegelin and David Mollin, Szuper Gallery, Rosie Cooper, Patrick Courtney, Cecilia Wee and guests, Mark McGowan, Peter Suchin, Disinformation, Celine Condorelli & Beatrice Gibson, Artists Anonymous and Jo Mitchell and guests will form a spectacle that unfolds throughout the 10 days in installations, performances and structures of participation including a party.

The question to be raised by the artists is whether the challenge or test by their subjective responses to 4’33” can situate new terms of the axiom, i.e. of an ‘indeterminate’ musical and artistic form, by rearticulating Cage’s certainty that it is impossible to achieve the intention of presenting ‘silence’.